SXSW Rocks!

It’s Sunday evening, halfway point through a jam packed SXSW. I wanted to do a quick post between events with a few notes that either, individually don’t make a full post or I’m working on a longer one.

Events/Parties

Unlike most parties where everyone shows up fashionably late, everyone at SXSW shows up early to get as much in as possible.

• The Hive Awards were much more entertaining than I thought (and I already had high expectations).
• The Diggnation event was crazy cool. Wow.
• Bryan person and crew nailed it with the Social Media Breakfast Mega Meetup.
• John Hagel’s book launch party and the Powered dinner were perfect because they were more intimate.
• I’m off to the PBS/RWW party now. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The People

While the parties have been amazing, thy’re not the highlight for me. I know it’s why so many people want to come here but for me the parties were just a convenient meeting place (probably because I don’t drink, so half way through when everyone else is getting their party on, I’m getting a little bored).

Best part hands down about SXSW has been meeting people I have known online, in some cases, as long as 2 or 3 years, and have never met in real life or people I haven’t seen for as long or longer. You all are great, I’m so glad I got to finally meet so many of you and I’m really sorry I didn’t get to meet more of you. I’m going to have to radically update my People to Meet Twitter list.

In fact I keep running into so many of you in the halls that I haven’t made it to very many sessions (but from what I’ve heard I haven’t missed too much).

The Sessions

The two best and most applicable sessions were the Social Business Summit (technically not a SXSW session but whatever) and Gaming the System with 4Chan. You may not realize the inherent irony in these two statements. The SBS was filled with speakers who are accomplished authors, entrepreneur CEO’s, Ivy League graduates and the best business strategists in this space. 4Chan (Wikipedia link because I don’t want to send you to the site) is the bridge the trolls of the Internet live under.  I that’s all very cryptic but I’m working on a much longer post.

Coming Posts

Other posts I’m working on (these are just working titles):

• What Social Businesses can learn from 4Chan
• Crowdsourcing Heats Up
• The Victims Caught in the Crossfire of Geolocation Wars
• The 3 Types of Social Media Strategy

And I’m only half way through the event.

What did I do right?

This was my first year so I wasn’t totally sure what to expect but here’s what I did right.

• Wing it: I made almost no plans for sessions to attend knowing that my priority was to meet people.
• Power Packing: I brought my own power strip, an extra battery for my netbook and power cords for my phones
• Pack light: This is not a fashion show. Leave the suit at home and pack only the necessities.
• Staying the whole week: It was rough to get Wed-Wed off but so worth it. I would have hated to be rushed and leave early. I still have so many people to meet and some sessions I really want to attend.

What would I do differently next time?

• Bring more business cards (although I still wouldn’t give many out)
• Bring my skateboard (for commuting purposes of course)
• Book my hotel sooner. I’m a little out of town and have to drive in and parking is painful.
• Plan more: While I’m glad I didn’t do a detailed plan I do wish I had planned a little bit better. The sessions were spread out between 3 building and I didn’t realize that I’d have to try and run from one building to another for sessions (remember running to class in college). This usually left me wondering around the convention center looking for a room that was in a different hotel. Of course that’s probably why I ended up meeting so many people.
• Take more pictures and videos. I forgot my camera and at parties the camera phone doesn’t cut it. I also wish I’d interviewed all the great people I met.

Look for a Part 2 on Wednesday.

Photo via Balakov

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On the WE Studio D, Thinkers & Doers blog this last week we posted the three part Zombie Media Trilogy. When we talk to companies we see a much bigger problem with social media adoption than just how do we get a blog, Facebook page or Twitter account started. The bigger problem is that no one seems to be looking at the much bigger problem of how do you truly create a scalable system to get the most out of social media. This is the first part in our effort to help people understand the larger problem.

Here are some highlights from each post. Click through to check out the complete posts. Let me know what you think.

The Coming Wave of Social Media Zombies

Now that companies are starting to show results with social media, the rest of the early majority and late majority adopters are going to continue to pile on. They’re going to try and strap on social media to their existing efforts and realize that they can’t sustain these efforts. Worse yet, they’ll launch these efforts with no thought to what to do with their new fans, friends and followers (assuming they get any to begin with).

The Top 10 Social Media Books You Have to Read if You Are a Zombie

# Naked Conversations About Zombies – How zombies are changing the way businesses talk with customers.
# The Zombie Groundswell – Winning in a world transformed by zombie technologies.
# Zombies Engage – The complete guide for zombies to build, cultivate and measure success on the Web. Foreword by Zombie Kutcher.

Social Media vs. Zombie Media

What does zombie media look like? Empty, vacuous Facebook pages and Twitter accounts devoid of conversation. [Warning] Zombie accounts often have lots of content flowing through them, but no one is there. It’s brainless.

Is zombie media the same as social media spam? No. Unlike most social media marketing, social media spam has a deliberate strategy and better ROI.

:Screenshot: timeinc.net

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Last month I gave Yammer (a product I like) a hard time because it doesn’t integrate with microblogging clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck and I feel that their pricing is prohibitive to large, enterprise companies.

I got several comments from people and had some really good discussions around the use of Yammer and the good and bad people face with the product. To my surprise the most engaged commenter was David Sacks, Founder and CEO of both Yammer and Geni, was previously the COO of Paypal and if that wasn’t enough, producer of the movie Thank You For Not Smoking.

I’ve been meaning to, to do a follow up post on what Yammer decided to launch instead of the features I thought they should have implemented but yesterdays Social Business Summit provided the perfect fodder I needed.

Lane Becker, CEO of Get Satisfaction, made the comment that we need to create more edges in our companies. Edges are where the cool things happen, it’s where conversations with partners and customers happen; it’s where innovation occurs.

John Hagel then later made the comment that companies need to move from knowledge stocks (proprietary IP that they milk dry) to knowledge flows (rich interactions and collaborations with stakeholders).

Earlier this month Yammer released Yammer Communities a tool that can do just that.  From the Yammer blog:

This new product feature enables companies and organizations to create a new type of Yammer network that is not restricted to a common email domain.  Yammer Communities provide companies with a secure, private, and separate space to communicate with their external business contacts.

This is an excellent move for Yammer. Traditional “partner portals” or “extranets” are secure, intranet like sites where companies can share things like documents and announcements with partners and over the years extranets have grown to include some level of collaboration. Most extranets suck for two reasons:

• They’re hard to use have horrible UX
• People don’t want one more place they have to remember to check

I have no doubt Yammer will destroy current extranets on both accounts. However I still think that being able to access Yammer from an aggregated application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic will make the service much easier to use. But David is a successful serial entrepreneur, the one category of business person I have the most respect for, obviously knows what he’s doing and shouldn’t be listening to every blogger with an opinion and an overinflated sense of importance.

I’m looking forward to giving the new communities feature a test to see how well it works.

It’s pretty long (just under 30 minutes) but if you’re interested here’s an interview Robert Scoble recently did with David.

I chat with the CEO of microblogging and corporate social service leader, Yammer, about what they are doing and how the enterprise market is becoming hyper competitive with companies like Salesforce, Jive, Socialtext, SocialContext, Google, and Zoho all angling for the market that Yammer was first in.

Internal social media is about to go through the growth external social media went through for the last few years. It’s going to be exciting to watch.

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I had an amazing day at the Dachis Social Business Summit. I have so much to write about it might take me a few weeks to catch up. Especially after surprise guest John Hagel presented. That was the most insightful 15 minutes I’ve heard in a long time.

I’ve been thinking out loud on this blog about what the future of the marketing org will look like inside companies.This has lead me to wonder about the total reconstruction of corporate organization. I’ve researched a lot of different models but there is one area I never looked to: The Middle Ages.

Douglas Rushkoff, who I wasn’t familiar with but if I was a normal PR/Marketing person I probably would have been, as he is an award winning writer, documentary film maker, media critic and accomplished author. He recently published a new book called Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Amazon Link) which we got for free at the summit (see disclosures at the bottom of the post for full FTC disclosure).

Doug, Dachis’ own Lee Bryant and several others referenced the pre-twentieth century corporate driven economies of Western Europe. While this may sound like heresy to many of us American capitalists their point was that we are moving back to a relationship driven economy.  One common theme was that we have entered a time where relationships matter. The network is no longer roads or servers, the network is us and we are people who connect with people.

Our current business climate functions the way it does because in order to achieve scale we have to give up intimacy. The twentieth century belief was that you couldn’t have both. The Internet, in theory, gave us both scale and intimacy but social media has fully delivered on that promise.

What was surprisingly absent from the summit was talk of technology. There was some, but just used mostly as examples not recommendations or even suggestions. The general agreement was that our current technology will look nothing like our future technology, but more important than that was that the technology, while enabling, doesn’t matter. Our current processes, value propositions and especially the way we communicate is about to devolve back to the Middle Ages.

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

Photo credit via kennymatic

FTC Disclosure Icons via Louis Gray

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I’m at the Dachis Social Business Summit here in Austin right before SXSW kicks off. Like all conferences they’ve established a hashtag #sbs2010. While trying to follow along with the rest of my attendees, to see who’s here and what’s resonating with them and I got this message

Possibly the most disruptive technology in social media was when Twitter acquired Summize which later became Twitter search and they’re limiting it at probably the biggest geek event of the year, SXSW, the very even that launched  Twitter several years ago. And the SXSW Interactive hasn’t even started yet.

Could you imagine if Bing limited search right now as they’re trying to compete with Google? Twitter is the little train that could and is competing/with partnering against/with, Google, Bing and Facebook.

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As I was traveling to SXSW last night I was struck by a thought about most of the PR & Marketing industry: We fix problems.

Solving a problem is what people do when they figure things out for the first time. When you solve a problem you create a solution. The next time you solve a problem you’re applying the solution to the problem to fix it.

The problem may be a communication crisis, it may be that people aren’t using a product because they don’t know about it or understand it. There are a hundred problems we fix everyday.

There’s a problem though; I don’t like fixing problems, I like solving problems.

Don’t get me wrong, fixing problems is great. People develop a mastery for applying a given solution to a problem. Unless they’re in research, Dr’s fix problems. The world has a lot of problems and we need people to fix them. There aren’t as many jobs for problem solvers, once you solve it you then need fixers.

We need more fixers. Fixers take solutions and continue to make them better. They improve on them and make them more efficient. They teach other people how to fix problems. What are your favorite problems to fix?

Fortunately we’re in a phase where social media still needs a lot of solutions. The trick for me, and you if you’re a problem solver, is to keep finding problems to solve. Keep applying social media to bigger and bigger problems. Maybe I’m idealistic but I believe social technologies have a real opportunity to solve the World’s biggest problems. Things like illiteracy, poverty and oppression.

What problems are you trying to solve?

Photo credit via Balakov

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I’ve mentioned the book I’ve been working on. I’ve actually made considerable headway on the weekends (except I can’t come up with a good title to save my life) and thought I’d share my current working summary. I’d love to hear your feedback.

I am looking for examples where social technologies have been used by companies to build trust, retain  knowledge, foster collaboration and spur innovation. If you or your company have any good examples please leave me a comment or shoot me an email: tac@newcommbiz.com

Social Media has brought about a groundswell of change that has swept the business world up in its wake. Antiquated processes, organizational structures and technologies  have kept companies from staying tuned in and engaged with customers and employees, to say nothing about keeping up with smaller, nimbler competitors.

No one can dispute that the Internet has radically reinvented the financial drivers and restraints of  traditional business models. It has lowered almost every barrier to entry in almost every industry. What the Internet has done to business models, the technologies behind social media are doing to the rest of business.

For the first time since the universal adoption of the org chart and the inbox (the physical not the digital one) we have the opportunity to fundamentally rethink how a business is run and what the various stakeholders of a company are and do. Customers don’t just buy products, they are helping companies ideate, design, develop and then sell products. Partnerships between two companies in a supply chain are no longer one dimensional relationships. Partners can also be competitors, customers and shareholders. In the very near future the way we recruit, retain and manage employees today will seem medieval.

The social media revolution is on the verge of creating truly social businesses. This change is being driven by the forces of: Trust, Knowledge, Collaboration & Innovation. These forces have become so important that have become there own form of capital. And like monetary capital they follow the same laws of capitalism and the free market. Until now companies have tried to govern these new forms of capital like a controlled market when what is needed now is a free market approach. Like in a free market, the rights of the owners must be protected but the free trade of capital must not be restricted.

The truly social business will be fully realized when social technologies are leveraged to build collaborative relationships across all company stakeholders.  By leveraging social technologies in an open and transparent way businesses will regain and build more trust among stakeholders. This increased trust is a necessity to creating greater shared knowledge, which the same social technologies have the ability to capture, organize and distribute at a yet to be seen level of efficiency. By building collaborative relationships with all company stakeholders using social technologies, businesses will be able to quickly create and capitalize more innovation.

No business has fully achieved this seemingly radical state but many early revolutionaries have developed pockets of deep expertise and experience. While many companies and their employees believe that the lack of adoption of these new technologies is hindering this quintessential state, the fundamental barriers are the outdated structures and process that have existed inside corporations since before the Internet. It’s time to stamp out the last bastions of resistance and remove those barriers and get out of our own way.

Join the New Comm Biz Facebook Page or follow the Twitter account.

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As social media has continued to evolve and we start to move into the era of social business we’re running into a linguistic snag; There are now two different definitions for Social Business.

Those of us in the social media world have not yet settled on an industry wide definition but I’ve recently started using this definition for social business:

The Social Business will be fully realized when social technologies are leveraged to build collaborative relationships across all company stakeholders. By leveraging social technologies in an open and transparent way businesses will also regain and build more trust among stakeholders. This increased trust will result in greater knowledge creation, which the same social technologies have the ability to capture, organize and distribute at a yet to be seen level of efficiency. By building collaborative relationships with all company stakeholders using social technologies, businesses will be able to quickly create and capitalize more innovation.

But according to the all mighty wikipedia Professor Dr. Muhammad Yunus, in his book Creating a World without Poverty – Social Business and the Future of Capitalism used this definition:

Social business is a cause-driven business. In a social business, the investors/owners can gradually recoup the money invested, but cannot take any dividend beyond that point. Purpose of the investment is purely to achieve one or more social objectives through the operation of the company, no personal gain is desired by the investors. The company must cover all costs and make revenue, at the same time achieve the social objective, such as, healthcare for the poor, housing for the poor, financial services for the poor, nutrition for malnourished children, providing safe drinking water, introducing renewable energy, etc. in a business way. The impact of the business on people or environment, rather than the amount of profit made in a given period measures the success of social business. Sustainability of the company indicates that it is running as a business. The objective of the company is to achieve social goal/s .

Of course you could have a social business that is also a social business according to both terms. In fact if we simplified the second definition of social business to a business with the objective to do social good (ignoring for a minute the nonprofit like financial status) then I would argue that a social technologies enabled social business would be more likely to do social good because they would be in tune with what their customers and employees want and that the non-profit like social business who uses social technologies would be a more successful social business.

As I pointed out in my post, The Evolution of New Media, Web 2.0, Social Media, Social Business: A Brief History of Everything, we are still in an evolving space and our definitions will continue to evolve. Will social business stick around? I don’t know, right now I can’t think of a better word.

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You may be familiar with author Daniel A Pink (blog & Twitter). As a right brainer, I loved his book,  A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future and I just finished his most recent book: Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. (Amazon affiliate links)

I downloaded the audio book for my last drive down to corporate headquarters in Portland, OR. I listened to the first half on the way down and the second half on the way back. Before my road trip was done I found a bookstore and bought two copies of the book. I’ve already given them away and will buy another two today. Maybe I should just buy them in bulk.

This is probably the most important book I can recommend for you to read this year. You will question every aspect of business management, your business model, organizational structure, parenting, schooling, even what you want to do with the rest of your life.

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

We have reached a level where work and knowledge can be and should be intrinsically motivating (doing it is its own reward). Not all jobs of course fit this model but as the economy rebounds there is no reason to do a job you don’t want to.  In my last post I talked about the parts of your business you are least likely to give up.

Social media has changed the landscape driven by our collective shift in motivation. In my opinion, we have entered a new economy, an economy where money is no longer the only capital. Money may no longer even be the most important capital.

Fellow New Comm Biz author, Jason has posted about companies sucking their wealth from the new Bourgeoisie. Maybe we have reached a point where, money is a commodity, easily obtained. Maybe not for everyone but for the western world where a college degree doesn’t mean as much as it used to money is no longer enough of a motivator.

I have a lot more to write about this topic but first I suggest reading Drive, then my posts will make a lot more sense. If that’s really possible

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I have stated before that, while I don’t know the guy and have never met him, Marc Andreessen is probably the entrepreneur of my generation that I most admire.

Today I came across a post on TechCrunch where Marc is quoted as saying that Old Media needs to burn the boats. I love this type of bold strategies. When Cortes came to Mexico he burnt the boats so they had no choice but to conquer, Marc says media companies need to do the same thing. The post is short and well worth your read but here’s my favorite quotes.

We got to talking about how media companies are handling the digital disruption of the Internet when he brought up the Cortes analogy. “You gotta burn the boats,” he told me, “you gotta commit.” His point is that if traditional media companies don’t burn their own boats, somebody else will.

Everyone knows this true (even if they don’t admit it). At some point physical media will be too cost prohibitive to create at the mass market level. Print will be the new vinyl.

Andreessen asked me if TechCrunch is working on an iPad app or planning on putting up a paywall. I gave him a blank stare. He laughed and noted that none of the newer Web publications (he’s an investor in the Business Insider) are either. “”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.”

And finally the part that will end any business discussion with any old media CEO:

Print newspapers and magazines will never get there, he argues, until they burn the boats and shut down their print operations. Yes, there are still a lot of people and money in those boats—billions of dollars in revenue in some cases. “At risk is 80% of revenues and headcount,” Andreessen acknowledges, “but shift happens.” You’d have to be crazy to burn the boats. Crazy like Cortes.

Radical strategies like this either get you excited or terrify you (or both).  Could you imagine the NYT or WSJ stopping all print publications and going digital only? Wow, that would be amazing. Lay off everyone connected to print and forge ahead. It won’t happen for years, maybe decades. Maybe they’ll always keep some niche print production, but eventually most printed papers will go away.

But it’s easy for us to criticize the media for not being willing to let go, but what about your business?  Every business has boats they’re holding on to. And it’s usually the part of their business that’s stopping them from being truly innovative. That’s the part of the business the startups love to attack.

In my world, agencies continue to submit to hourly billing even though it’s a pain, unproductive and not conducive to providing the best work. Marketers refuse to give up on the CPM advertising metric (cost per thousand rate advertisers charge). It’s broken and doesn’t prove any type of business ROI. These are two boats I would volunteer to ignite myself.

What are your business boats? What would be the hardest thing to give up?

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